City Council Study Session Agenda and Packet 2010 04 27

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Page 2 of 3 city residents to replace their incandescent holiday lights with LED Holiday-Lights. It was our second year for that particular program. We started it right after Halloween, and continued it through the Parade of Lights. We collected 400-plus strings of older incandescent holiday lights for scrap-metals recycling (8 big trash bags) from over 80 residents and the City. We passed out over 330 discount coupons to them to purchase new LED holiday lights, with about 90% redeemed at six local participating merchants (up from five in 2008). The City was also able to offset some of its costs for new LED lights. All of our participating merchants were happy with the increased business our program brought to them, and expressed their willingness to join us in such a program again at the end of this year. IF we can secure County grant funds for 2010 with conditions that do not add to the City’s costs, we’ll plan to offer the LED Holiday-Lights exchange program again this coming winter. NEXT: Our members began exploring options to reduce the use of single-use plastic shopping bags within our community. Last spring, several of our LRCAB members met with members of Lafayette’s equivalent board, Waste-Reduction Advisory Committee (WRAC), to discuss this topic. The con-sensus from our meeting was to implement information & education measures describing the wasteful use of plastic bags and how to reduce usage. We prepared a slide show that we presented over the course of the Labor-Day weekend at Community Park, and collected about 200 comments from residents about their opinions on dealing with plastic bags. Comments ranged from urging bans on plastic bags to keeping government out of it, with the majority calling for some kind of public action. And with some additional editing work, our slide show may be suitable for broadcast on our local cable TV channel. We had also intended to contact our Chamber-of-Commerce and other local business associations, to work with them to create programs to combine reusable-bag purchases by- and-for local merchants. We have yet to begin that task. NEXT: We had discussed changing the name of our board but it was our lowest-priority item, so nothing was done about it in 2009. At our first meeting in January 2010, with a majority of Louisville new members, we immediately reached agreement on a name-change to the Sustainability Advisory Board . We present that name-change to you now, with our request that you approve it. LAST: During our meeting with you last spring, several of you had asked questions about where we can find information about the costs and benefits of green-building practices. After our meeting, we decided to pursue an information/education effort to collect such information and present it in easy-to-find formats as part of our city’s website. Individual members picked a specific topic (such as water usage, PV solar installations, window replacements, rebate programs, etc), and were to create lists of internet links that residents could find on various board & department pages on our city website. But our loss of several members in the latter months of last year – including the member who was going to organize all the lists and do the